(Please forgive my absence. The last two months have been a bit chaotic.)

This was too good to pass up.

Number One son, my clone in personality if not appearance, started a discussion on Facebook: So… at what point does the MiniTrue behavior of the current administration become an actionable problem?

A friend of his responded: Ah the ministry of truth telling you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

My first thought on seeing “Mini-True” was Verne Troyer. I remember a few of Orwell’s unique terms – Big Brother, thoughtcrimes, doublespeak and the homeland Oceania – but not the contraction MiniTrue. I asked Peg and she didn’t remember it either.

Number One Son: Ministry of Truth. S’newspeak
The Old Man: Millennial shorthand again.
Number One Son: Jesus dad did you even READ the book?

Yeah, numbnuts, I read 1984 in 1969 when I was a high school freshman. And Animal Farm. And Brave New World, though I’ve never read Lord of the Flies. One my high school buddies called me Piggy because I had “assmar” (asthma).I had an image of Julia I based on a blonde from a beer ad in TV Guide. Years later when I saw the 1956 film version of 1984 with Edmund O’Brien as Winston Smith, Jan Sterling’s Julia came pretty close to what I’d imagined.

I grew up during a time that was similar to what’s going on now but, in its own way, far uglier, although Peg thinks the present is worse. Black people were still being lynched in the South during the 1960s. Detroit and other inner cities burned in 1967 as black people rioted against police brutality, poverty and racism. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated within a couple of months of each other in 1968, killing our hopes of racial harmony and a return to Camelot.

Our collective stomachs knotted as we watched old men on television randomly drawing birth dates for the draft. We were in a war in Vietnam we could never win, and our leaders knew it.  Fifty thousand US troops died. So did an estimated 1.3 million North and South Vietnamese soldiers, along with 2 million Vietnamese civilians. The American casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are far lower, but the faulty rationales for “bringing freedom and democracy to you savages” persist.

College campuses exploded. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan organized “teach-ins” (a.k.a. “preaching to the choir”) and antiwar protests. The Weather Underground Organization didn’t think the SDS was militant enough, split off in 1969 and started a bombing campaign targeting banks and government buildings. Diana Oughton, who grew up in Dwight, Illinois, about 15 minutes from where I lived in Streator, died in a Greenwich Village apartment when the bomb she was building exploded prematurely. She was only 28.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was eclipsed by Chicago cops tear-gassing and beating the crap out of protestors. Mike Wallace and Dan Rather, CBS reporters who would become legends, were assaulted on national TV. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, whom columnist Mike Royko called “The Great Dumpling,” made his infamous proclamation: ““The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

On October 15, 1969, a few million people around the country – mostly young, some older – joined The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Our high school administration had banned wearing black armbands in honor of the day, prompting several seniors to walk out and assemble at the American Legion memorial in the city park. I wore an armband home that day. My stepfather called me a Communist and said the kids at the memorial should have been lined up and shot. I’d never thought of him having any political inclinations and I was surprised as hell. I picked a side that day and I’ve never wavered.

Six of my high school friends and I read How Old Will You Be in 1984?, a collection of essays from high school “underground” papers around the country. We would all turn 30 in 1984, the age at which we thought as teenagers, adults could no longer be trusted — a sobering thought. (The irony is I now think of thirty as “young and stupid,” and I don’t trust people my age when they have money and power.)

We printed four editions of “The Paper,” our naïve attempt to change the hearts and minds of high schoolers in a blue collar town. Dennis’ dad gave us access to a mimeograph machine; we printed them on pastel paper and sold them for a dime. I still have some of them left, crumbling in a manila envelope somewhere in our basement. It got us mentioned in a much larger collection, The Movement Toward A New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution., but not much else.

USA Today ran this opinion on September 6, 2019: “If things are so bad under President Trump, why aren’t we seeing larger protest movement?“  My snarky comment was “Because people won’t look up from their cell phones.” They aren’t willing to risk being teargassed, beaten or shot for what they may view as an exercise in futility. There have been a few symbolic protests and arrests but nothing that has altered minds or policy.

learned protesting doesn’t accomplish shit. My generation wanted a “revolution,” but it didn’t turn out as we’d hoped. Not even close. The only things we “accomplished” were President Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election, and the backlash from the riots killed Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning. The US didn’t pull out of Vietnam for another 5 years. We got Richard Nixon as President, his war on drugs and his eventual resignation for the Watergate cover-up. Republicans are still fighting the culture wars, even though all of us dirty hippie godless Commies are grandparents and more worried about our 401k’s than sticking it to The Man. (Click here for a story about the couple on the Woodstock album cover, married for almost 50 years!)

Pissing and moaning on Facebook may be cathartic. Signing online petitions to your weasels in Congress might make you think you’re doing something, but it doesn’t. Voting helps but only to a point. Each person can vote for two Senators, one Congressional Representative and the President. I can’t vote Moscow Mitch, Ted Cruz or lunatics like Louie Gohmert out of office. You could elect Jesus Christ Himself as President and as long as the GOP controls Congress, you ain’t getting shit.

Change is incremental and requires fundamental shifts in public opinion. Civil rights, voting rights, gay marriage and legalized marijuana didn’t happen overnight. Bernie’s minions should stop hoping for a “progressive” miracle worker with a magic wand and work towards changing Congress instead of whining about how the DNC “screwed” him in 2016.

Trump’s base will crawl on their knees over hot coals to vote. Millennials and Gen X’ers will comprise more than half of next year’s eligible voting population, almost twice the number of Baby Boomers (whom some of them blame for their misery). They are in a much better position to alter our country’s course because they have more to lose by doing nothing.

In 1969, Les McCann and Eddie Harris performed “Compared to What?” at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Some things haven’t changed in fifty years

“The President, he’s got his war
Folks don’t know just what it’s for
Nobody gives us rhyme or reason
Have one doubt, they call it treason
We’re chicken-feathers, all without one nut. God damn it!
Tryin’ to make it real, compared to what? (Sock it to me)”

We still have a long way to go.

Illustration © Canstock Photo / Satori

Compared to What? By Gene McDaniels. © 1966